SEVEN
Restless Walker was very like a spider, an old Daddy Longlegs, holed up in his airy private room at the corner of the bland cream building of the care facility. Set back in the farthest corner near the open screen window, the better to enjoy the germ-cleansing qualities of the breeze, within sight of the little league fields, which he gazed upon from time to time although they were empty now in the afternoon sun, he stretched upon a plastic webbed lawn chair, the seersucker robe pulled loosely around him, his bony butt perched on a tuft of toilet tissue, spread so it covered the whole surface of the seat.
"He sprays it down with Pine Sol and water three times a day, don't you, Willard?"
The black nurse who had led them to Willard's room seemed comfortable with his fixations. She laughed as she explained the disinfecting procedure, and she seemed to take real care not to touch the tissue-wrapped artifacts of the room.
There was tissue everywhere, carefully spread to cover the top of the enamelled metal bureau, wrapped around water glasses, the radio, the top rails of the bed and chairs. Even the mirror, the faucets, and Willard's shaving brush had their white wrapping.
Willard, for his part, did not seem to take any special precautions on the black woman's account. Nor did he seem to mind her laughter at his precautions.
"Had my sister's kid get me this here lawn chair," he explained. "Air flows through it, you see. Germs got nowhere to land but on the metal, and I take care of that."
He and the black nurse laughed conspiratorially.
"I'll let you's alone," she said.
"Good thing too," Willard said.
The nurse paused. Flynn and Emma waited. But Willard was not being rude, he was merely continuing his initial conversation.
"Ain't seen the child in two, three years," he said. "She brung the chair for me, then hightailed it..."
"She live in the city, Mr. Walker," the nurse said. "You knows that. She live in New York City."
"Niggers," Willard said, and the nurse went out, a hushing, admonishing look on her face.
"You shouldn't say those things, Mr. Walker."
Willard screwed his eyes at Emma. He whispered to her.
"It's nigger boys, Miss," he said. "She knows that as well as I do. Their own kind know the diseases..."
"That isn't true and you know it!"
Flynn was not sure there wouldn't be a fight first thing. Emma was rightly riled; Willard seemed to draw his eyes back into his head as he crouched further toward the corner in his chair.
There was a pulse throbbing in the web of purple veins at Willard's ankle. Sashes of toilet tissue hung from the window shades, there were white paper packets tucked into shelves opposite the bed.
Like a spider, Flynn thought. He's packed these spittly white things away to devour later.
Suddenly Willard cackled, he-he-he, like he had that morning. The deep red eyes and the bony, large forehead bobbed with the laughter. Willard stretched a long arm down next to the chair and removed a covering of tissue from an open coffee can. Squit-squit, he spat brown into the brown of the can, then covered it up again.
"She's a fireballer, ain't she?" he said to Flynn.
He-he-he, he scratched at the purple web of the ankle.
"Yessir," he said to Flynn again, "Girl throws smoke, doesn't she?"
Flynn nodded stupidly.
"Don't envy you none living with that one," Willard said.
"I don't."
"I'm truly sorry to offend ye, Maam," Willard bowed his head as if he were about to tumble from the chair. "You're not the first to call me on it, I admit. Prob'ly not the last neither...all I can say is I have my reasons, don't you see? I have my reasons."
Emma nodded glumly, settling for this much. There was a charm Willard had. You felt sure you could not pin him down, that he would just crawl up clockwise to a higher strand of his web."
"Take a chair," he said, "and don't mind the prophylaxis..."
"What?" Flynn said.
"The paper! I can string it out again after you left. It'll be time then for the pine wash anyways..."
Why are we here.
You have to know some things.
"You two okay?" Willard asked.
Flynn nodded and, careful not to disturb the bunting, walked to the window. The bridge rose in a bow toward the salmon colored Canadian shore, it too was spider work, a spoked, bolted web. Emma had once lived there, within sight, came over with her Canuck husband before the gates to heaven closed, before everything began to be screwed down, people afraid of nigger boys, of Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, and the floating leftovers of a war, the Indochinese gypsies, taking all the jobs. There was work then for a Canadian kid, a woodworker. In '67 people wore flowers in their hair, a cabinet maker could sell small boxes of cherrywood and brass, make oak furniture handrubbed with tung oil.
Emma was a gypsy then, with long flowered skirts and sad eyes, and her long hair held back with kerchiefs and beaded hairbands. She walked in sandles made of waterbuffalo hide, a loop at each big toe holding them on. She was pregnant and played the guitar, she threw pots on a foot-powered wheel. There were art fairs in Clayton, Alex Bay, Syracuse, South.
What now he wondered she knew.
The three ballfields spread out in the middle distance like a fan of brown and green, the silver ruffle of the outfield fences at their ends, glinting where the sun caught the chain. The river was silver and blue and sun hazed. A boy rode up to the empty diamonds on his bike, red baseball cap backwards on his head. He walked out onto the diamond with his glove and bat, set the bat on the dusty mound, and began to throw the ball into the chainlink backstop, chase it down, walk back and throw it again.
Bertie could give him a bushel basket full, Flynn thought.
The hollow sproing of the ball against the backstop was a familiar sound.
Willard wheezed air up into his nostrils.
"There's a girl comes there, Flynn, ever' now and then. Throws like a mule and can use her glove. Be women in the bigs, someday, now that it's all niggers..."
"Goddamn it, Willard!" Flynn stared him down until the red eyes dropped way back in the sockets and his jaw began to shake.
"It's like I was saying," Flynn said. "Baseball's been the testing ground, you know. My father went over this bridge and upriver to see Jackie Robinson in the minors, the Montreal Royals Triple A...There was people used to write to Aaron when he was chasing down Ruth's record, told him no nigger could ever beat the Babe, no matter what the numbers say..."
Flynn was staring at Willard.
"You didn't say any of that, Jack, not before," Emma said. "You were thinking it maybe, but you didn't say it..."
"I want to get you out of here for a time, Willard," Flynn said. "Take you out on a pass... I think you need to see some life again. Maybe go down to the Cape and see Gerard, talk about bird-dogging..."
Willard's eyes brightened, he leaned a little forward.
"I'd need a mask, Flynn," he said, then squitted into the spit bucket.
"They got them in the hardware store, three for a buck or so, works for germs and such..."
"Could be arranged," Flynn said.
"You have other things to do, Jack," Emma said.
She was not cutting Willard, she was reminding Flynn. He knew that. It ached still, whatever Bertie and Emma seemed to know he had to do.
"There's still time, isn't there?" Flynn asked.
"I think so," she said, "I can see if you want me to."
She was going to go then. No, Flynn thought, don't leave me yet.
"I'd like to talk to you in private myself, Flynn," Willard whispered.
Emma waited by the door, silent, questioning. Flynn noddded and she let herself out, careful with the tissue wrapped handle of the door.
Willard watched the door as if he could see her through it, seeming to watch until he was sure she had cleared the cream tiled corridor, the screened-in day room, the outer waiting room. Then he rose and moved toward the shelves, making his way slowly in a windmill kind of walk, as if he were stepping on slippery stones.
It's his arms make him a spider, the ham hands on bony pendulums, the fingers splayed s.
His knees were bony also, he was all bones, skull to longlegs.
"Ya throw heat, Willard?"
"Hooks," he said. "Yellow hammers..."
He kept making his way toward the shelves, arms moving in clocklike strokes. A curve ball pitcher, Flynn thought.
"Was three strong boys ahead of me on the chart," Willard said.
"Eyetalian kid, a Polack, and a fireballer with less meat on 'im than I had... I had something fair for heat, but it wouldn't make it. Hell, I knew it then...starting thinking about managing..."
"Ever try?"
Willard had reached the shelves, was unwrapping a white packet. He raised his white eyebrows high at Flynn's question.
"Over there ta Clarkson College," he said. "Coached a season. All assholes! College never was a way to play baseball, it was different then, Flynn. It was a hard way up the ladder and not everyone went. College kids is spoiling baseball..."
"I went to college, Willard."
"I knowed that, Flynn," he answered with a vinegary tone. Flynn was getting on his nerves.
"What you come here for anyway?" Willard said, setting down the partially unwrapped packet. "What'd you come and spoil my afternoon for? Why don't you look after your sister?"
My sister's dead, Flynn thought. Then no, "Emma...," he said.
"Nice girl," Willard said, real laconic. He took up the packet again, unwound the toilet tissue wrapping. "Kind of a nurse, isn't she?" he asked. "Comes around a lot..."
"I don't know," Flynn said. "I don't know why I came. I guess I owed you something...I owe something, and you were here."
Willard set down the unwrapped object, a small leatherette ledger book with gilt-edged pages, and JOURNAL stamped in gold on the cover. He quickly unwrapped another packet. Pine Sol and a sponge, he rubbed down the cover of the ledger book and began to unwrap still another package.
Old Spice, he washed it generously over his face and arms with a huge palm.
"You pitched with that kid used pickle juice," he said.
Randy Jones. Flynn nodded.
"Smart kid," Willard said. "Musta been an old timer give him that secret..."
Must of been, Flynn thought. He had seen a hundred balms: BenGay, beargrease, mink oil, Lydia Pinkhams, mayonnaise, Vitamin E, DMSO--you could make a list a mile long. Everyone still hunting for Ponce de Leon's magic arm lotion.
"This here conditions your skin and wards off micro-organisms," Willard said. "You'd be surprised how many bad arms is really a result of micro-organisms, burrowin' into your muscles like chiggers..."
My sister was the moon, her eyes oceans. She could not live beyond twenty, she was that in '61, when I went to Iowa. Micro-organisms had burrowed into her spine, meningitis. Flynn imagined microscopic larvae, maggots or corn borers. They affected the seed and husk in opposite ways, the pressure expanding her skull, a forehead wider than Willard's, soft and white and broad, the dark Dutch bangs falling over them in a straight line, like a fringe.
The brain, Flynn imagined, the brain was like a bad clam, something dark and grainy, almost liquid.
Joe Flynn once boated a perch with three eyes, the gills all encrusted with fungus. It saw too much to defend itself from ill. It was a monster, life made monsters, some were beautiful and round as the melon moon on an August night.
A bad clam. A slug within a cave of mother pearl.
"I'm glad you come," Willard said. He thumped the book against a closed fist. "I'm glad you come, Flynn, I'm closing out my career and I need some company..."
"I know about that feeling."
Willard extracted a pouch of BeechNut chaw from the seersucker, extended it toward Flynn, who declined. Willard looked up from the chaw with bug eyes, kind eyes.
"Suppose you do, partner," he said. "Suppose you do..."
His long legs crawled over to the spit can. Squit. He turned back toward Flynn, then settled into the web chair, rearranging the tissue below his bony butt as he lowered himself.
"I'm makin' a book, Flynn," Willard said, "and you're gonna be in it."
Willard extracted a fountain pen, wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag, taking it from the same pocket where he stowed the chaw. He opened the ledger book and wet a finger to turn through the pages, stopping at a point midway through the gilt pages. He unscrewed the cap from the fountain pen, then held it up for Flynn to see.
"Parker Brothers," he said. "You bought it fer me the other morning."
"Glad you could use it."
"It shits," Willard said. "Uses little tubes of ink, not the real stuff from the bottle."
"Sorry."
Willard nodded impatiently, put the pen to the page, and looked up at Flynn expectantly.
Flynn did nothing.
"Begin," Willard said.
"Aw Restless...come on...," Flynn said.
"So whatta ya want, a million dollar advance?"
Flynn laughed and sat down. "You should be telling me," he said.
"I never hit the big show, Flynn, you know that. That's where I want your part to begin..."
"How many parts you got?"
"You gonna pitch or bitch, Flynn?"
I suppose it was magic then, coming out between the lines and into the sun beyond the shadow of the grandstand. You know how it is when you first sit there at Alex Bay, down behind the Monticello where my Dad used to live... Scenic View Park they call it, but it's fairyland, Willard... When Mom first went to the Noble hospital there, the pain was so bad she'd turn her head toward the river and just sail on it, you could see her fly, Willard, out there among the islands, like the moon navigates through the tufts of high clouds on a summer's night.
I guess it was magic. I remember creeping out there as a kid, moving across the limestone boulders of the bluffs on hands, knees, and toes, blinky eyed and scared but dying to see it...moving like a water strider in little circles on the rock, and then feeling the world let go below you, flying out on a stone pillow the size of a cloud, holding my breath with wonder...
It was like falling into a storybook, one of those things where cardboard elves and gremlins leap out at you from the page and there's too much to see... Flying, Willard! Flying through your eyes out into the islands, the river there like an enchanted sea...
Boldt Castle out there on Heart Island spinning in your eyes like Disneyland in an upsidedown helicopter, all that gingerbread stone, towers and paraputs and rough walls pushing up above the green. I was always afraid I would fall, swirling down through the islands, bumping along like a bass plug on the current... It was like those dreams you have, especially after pitching, where the world falls away and you go with it. I'd hold my breath to keep from puking and fix my eyes on the stone arch at the beach, then work my sight gradually over the choppy, glinting water until I saw Imperial Island and the house with eyebrow windows, the red roof, mustard walls, and green landings and trim. There you could rest, you could rest your eyes, like when you're on a plane coming into New York say, and the whole cabin's leaning over on a wing and the air is bumping and filled with little pockets of rushing, empty air that'd just as soon drop you as throw you up, and you try real hard to focus in on something to keep your balance, the statue out there in the harbor, the Trade Towers like two bald cliffs, and the stewardess is making her way back along the aisle to check the seatbelts, holding herself with the luggage rack to keep from falling over into your lap...
You could rest your eyes...and then move on slowly, upriver, where the lights were softer and the house on Cherry Island with the round porches and green gables always seemed to drowse. The Queen Anne orange roof of a boathouse like a witch's cap... I got so's I could name most of the islands, you know. The Millionaires Row they call it, the Manhattan group. There's something to names, Willard. Virgil Trucks, Enos Slaughter, Honus Wagner, and Early Wynn... The islands, up and down, are like that: Pine and little Zavicon, Deer, Douglas and Lotus Islands, Fairyland, Comfort, Fiddler's Elbow and Estrellita, the little star, always making me think of my sister Esther... It got so I was as afraid to crawl back in from that ledge of rock as I was to go out there. That's how it was, like when you first see it, not now when you climb up the hill from the hotdog joints and souvenir shacks, and it seems a floating circus; speedboats cutting the wake of chipping oil tankers, the Gananoque tour boats like white buses, hurrying in and out of the channel and through the International Rift... Now it's all kind of tacky and noisy and fast, but when you first see it you think you finally grew up to find the land where the giants walk and trolls hide and lizards fly, you know... It's like looking into the eyehole of one of those old easter eggs with sugar shells and painted scenes inside...
"Cut the crap, Flynn, I'm an old man and I can hear the sleighbells and I want to know."
"I'm telling you!" Flynn said, and then he calmed down. "It's that way when you come up, Willard, I'm telling you. Now give us some chaw..."
"I can hear the sleighbells, Flynn... I know it, even though I know none of us knows anything, and that's half the problem. My better half is gone now and I got only a runt bitch from my litter and I know, Flynn! I know... I'm the end of the line, the last stop. We rose in the west of Vermont, up near where it wasn't sure whether you was a Canuck or not, depending on what side of the bed you plopped out on. Up ta Alberg, Vermont, you know it, Flynn? No one knows it... We rose there. Always seemed a joke in that, you know, Flynn? A rose in the west... it's like the sun's a flower, you see what I mean, Jack? the dawn light laying upon the horizon like petals littering a windowsill where the first bloom's blasted... You know that word, Flynn, blasted flowers? You ever read Lord Milton's poems, "O fairest flower, no sooner blown than blasted..."
Rose came up when I did. We were in PONY league the same time and he never hit me. Fellow says that first time Rose shows up to Geneva he walks into the club office, you know, happy as can be, and asks a guy, "Who's the second baseman around here?" Turns out the fellow he asks is the second bagger--it's that kind of story--so Rose says to him, "I'm the new second baseman..."
It was like that, Restless, like the world was brash and what the hell. I spent two years in college before I went to Rookie League, a half season there before I rode out the PONY. The whole world was new, Willard, like looking out into Millionaires Row. Musial and Gibson, White, Groat and Boyer. Rose came up and won the Rookie of the Year. Even the strike zone was wider, just for me, you know... It was like the stars spread out in the sky, like you suddenly got to pitch up through the wrong end of a funnel... I was hurting to go up to the big show, Willard, hurting to go...
O Jackie, we've been alone so long.
Alone so long here we don't intend to any longer. When you resign from human touch, Flynn, you can get powerful alone, so it's welcome to friends and friends of friends and stammers from afar. I haven't had a city or a friend or a decent thing to say about anybody short of my mother for years now; haven't touched no one purposely in a year or more, not since this little girl was here with her long hair and brown eyes and I made her give me a piece of gum, just to see if I could still touch...
I remember shaking Gib's hand, those dark intelligent eyes drilling into you like two big piledrivers. I was fresh as new shit, the Skipper at Johnson City told me I was certified stuff and I come up on the train thinking I'd move right into his locker, you know, and then those piledrivers hit me. Most powerful man I ever met, short of Wolfman. You can say what you want, Willard, but I tell you in this country black men know things...
Gibson was quiet for sure, you know, but good enough about it, welcoming me to the team and all, me standing at this locker that still said Bauta from before they traded him. Everything was mellow, Willard, everything but me. They'd come off an eight game losing streak before the break and then set out to winning, eventually it was nineteen out of twenty... I was stuff, like money in the bank or a long weekend off. I've seen it since, I've seen fellows like me come up, young arms like red meat in the supermarket bins, ready to throw that meat into rags, you know, make hamburger of it for the cause... You need red meat arms for a pennant race... They dropped a ball into my flannels while I had 'em down to hitch up my stockings, I pulled em up with a major league tug, a red meat tug, and jammed my balls with the balls and saw The Man laughing by his locker... I decided then that that was my job, Restless, to cheer them up through August and win a few games along the way...
Was on his way home, Flynn, eighty some years ago. I heard the bells coming, you could hear the sleighbells through the cracking cold night, him and his brassbells out there in the black ice of night, the sled long past Rouses Point and on the lake ice heading home. Couldn't of been more than four years old, Jack, and I remember my brother all bundled up in furs and out there in the night. Shouting, "Come in, Father, come in..." You can't come in farther than he did that night, Flynn, and that's a fact.
The first time I came in I remember hearing a vendor in the stands clear as a bell, shouting "Hotdog Here, Hotdog Here..." I mean all that sound up there, a river of it swirling around you, sometimes spilling out over the flat, and you hear this one foghorn voice...
I must of looked up at it, Willard, after I warmed up; came in down three runs after Broglio went one and a third, two years younger than Sedeki. We was to be the future of the birds.
I must of looked up, cause this voice comes out of the Cincinnati dugout. "Yeah, he's calling you, hot dog!" and they all laugh, the laugh spilling over to our own boys, even Bill White, over there at first like he was all year, covering his face with a glove... Struck out six straight, Restless, I know you got that in your book. Two in the second, three in the third, one in the fourth, tied a record Richert tied the year before with LA, most consecutive for a rookie pitcher. Karl Spooner held it before us in '54, but he pitched two games for the Dodgers and never let a run, goose eggs for an ERA...
Went eight and four and two-nine-two myself that year, and couldn't understand it when I didn't get to come in against the Dodgers when we needed to win in September. I was that fresh, Restless! I thought I could pitch with Koufax then, in a year in which he won twenty-five and pulled a one-eight-eight ERA.
I was four or five years old. I heard my brother calling and then come in. We could hear the sleighbells far away in the night, could hear the wolves and the wind singing as one sound...
They thought he was dead, they did. We all did, we thought my father had gone out and died. And then that sleigh come in...rails on the snow making that soft sound like someone chewing ice, little balls of icy bells on the horse's mane, my old man upright on the seat, whip in hand and beard gold with frost in the lantern light.
He was dead as dust.
I remember Gibson's eyes, Willard, when he came in after Dickie Nen hit the homer in the ninth to tie us up. Nen was red meat, too, Restless, just like me, a transfusion of meat for the pennant race. Gib came into the dugout and he just stood there and looked at me. I couldn't tell if he was trying to show me how it would be, or if he was blaming me cause I was red meat too. After we dropped it in the thirteenth, I didn't dare look at anybody, especially not Musial. The Man would never have his World Series and red meat was to blame...
Dead as dust. He'd frozen stiff, upright on his seat, outrunning the wolves, and none of them there at the house had half an idea what to do with him. So the five boys, my brothers and my uncles, they hefted him up off the seat and sat him in the barn, stiff as a statue and his eyes crusted over with frost. They waked him there, Flynn, and he disposed of his first night's death with as much wit as you can find in hot mustard, a whiskey stuck in his ghost white hand and his arse on two bales of fine timothy hay, and a white cloth over his face.
Toward morning some of the freeze in his flesh let up, along with the death rigors, and he nodded once before they packed him up, as if to say, "Well, that's it, boys." And they packed him up, buck upright still and still wary of wolves, off to the mortician cause this wasn't your normal case of burial and they needed an expert to striaghten things out, if you'll excuse my phrase. Took a coal fire burning two weeks on the burial ground before they could open it up and stow him. Story is my dad waited it out under a tarp in the ice shed in town, or so they say...
Used to stack up the dead like cord wood in the early days of the Vermont frontier, or so some say. Bury em all when the ground turned muck and no sooner...
Gold, frankincense, and merde, Flynn..., life's all shit sometimes but even then it smells...
He laughs, the high cackle.
Merde's what the Frog's say up Kay-beck way... Knew enough Frenchy loggers in my early years, Flynn. Played my first baseball with an ash branch and a buggy bolt wrapped into a ball of deerhide. There wazza fella named She'll Bear, a Frog lumberjack, craziest man I ever knowed. She'll Bear used'ta sink his axe into the center of the table ever-time he sat down, slicing his bread over the open edge and otherwise feeling over it with his greasy, leather thumb, always looking for nicks... He laughed like a loon but he was the sanest man I ever knowed after his fashion. Ever week or so the cook house boy'd have to replace the table slab where She'll Bear split it with his cutlery...
Yessir, Flynn, 'tis the quiet frogs you watch for, in cookhouses and clubhouses, as well as life as it's led on the larger pond...
He laughs again, memory a flash in his rheumy eye.
Time in Vermont...he-he-he...just over the border, four of us'n skinnydippin in a spring pond and the frogs was stacked up like green flapjacks humping away, and old Roger here's feeling the mood rise in him and his wand cuts the top of the water like a fat pink reed...
He-he-he, the girls that was with us ran for their clothes and prob'ly clear back into town. Hellfire, even I stayed away from him, Flynn. Only man I ever knowed was riled by frogs...
Koufax spun out fifteen K's the first game of the Series... Koufax was what I remember most of the early years. I learned something there, Willard. Turned from bein' only red meat watching that man...
Christ, I remember things... That's my curse, in fact, Flynn, that's why I'm making a book. I remember things but when I coax em to my tongue they go away like fireflies when the dew settles. Left wet's the story of my life, Flynn, or anyone's for that matter. Never knew scheiss about weather. Fellows could look at a blue sky and pretend to spy some haze there. "Rain by five," they'd say, "Rain by five..." You want to sit out in the drizzle and deny it, they were so damn fine-minded about it. Best I could ever tell was that a slap of warm wind in February meant you'd freeze by morning. The Lord's torture on the heathen is a warm Feb'rary breeze, Flynn. A yawn fom hell and three days from the Yukon...
He cackles again.
"It's the water will kill you, Willard," Flynn said. "My whole family went by water of one sort or another. Ain't germs you should worry about, it's water. Begin there, end there..."
Willard walks sprightly to the closet and cackles, opens the door to show the shelves of bottled water, in plastic jugs and ball jars, each holding a little wave, glinting in the late sun.
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